Sontag Theatre and Film

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FILM ND THE TRESUS N SONT G

The big question is whether there is an unbridgeable division, even opposition, be-tween the two arts. Is there something genuinely theatrical, different in kind fromwhat is genuinely cinematic ?Almost all opinion holds that there is. A commonplace of discussion has it that filmand theatre are distinct and even antithetical arts, each giving rise to its own standardsof judgment and canons of form. Thus Erwin Panofsky argues, in his celebratedessay Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures (1934, rewritten in 1946), that oneof the criteria for evaluating a movie is its freedom from the impurities of theatricality.To talk about film, one must first define the basic nature of the medium. Those whothink prescriptively about the nature of live drama, less confident in the future of theirart than the cinephiles in theirs, rarely take a comparably exclusivist line.

The history of cinema is often treated as the history of its emancipation from theatricalmodels. First of all from theatrical frontality (the unmoving camera reproducingthe situation of the spectator of a play fixed in his seat), then from theatrical acting(gestures needlessly stylized, exaggerated-needlessly, because now the actor couldbe seen close up ), then from theatrical furnishings (unnecessary distancing of theaudience's emotions, disregarding the opportunity to immerse the audience in reality).Movies are regarded as advancing from theatrical stasis to cinematic fluidity, fromtheatrical artificiality to cinematic naturalness and immediacy. But this view is far toosimple.Such over-simplification testifies to the ambiguous scope of the camera eye. Becausethe camera can be used to project a relatively passive, unselective kind of vision-aswell as the highly selective ( edited ) vision generally associated with movies-

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FILM AND THEATREcinema is a medium as well as an art, in the sense that it can encapsulate any of theperforming arts and render it in a film transcription. (This medium or non-art aspectof film attained its routine incarnation with the advent of television. There, moviesthemselves became another performing art to be transcribed, miniaturized on film.) Onecan film a play or ballet or opera or sporting event in such a way that film becomes, rela-tively speaking, a transparency, and it seems correct to say that one is seeing the eventfilmed. But theatre is never a medium. Thus, because one can make a movie ofa play but not a play of a movie, cinema had an early but, I should argue, fortuitousconnection with the stage. Some of the earliest films were filmed plays. Duse andBernhardt and Barrymore are on film-marooned in time, absurd, touching; there is a1913 British film of Forbes-Robertson playing Hamlet, a 1923 German film ofOthello starring Emil Jannings. More recently, the camera has preserved HeleneWeigel's performance of Mother Courage with the Berliner Ensemble, the LivingTheatre production of The Brig (filmed by the Mekas brothers), and Peter Brook'sstaging of Weiss's Marat/Sade.But from the beginning, even within the confines of the notion of film as a mediumand the camera as a recording instrument, a great deal other than what occurredin theatres was taken down. As with still photography, some of the events capturedon moving photographs were staged but others were valued precisely because theywere not staged-the camera being the witness, the invisible spectator, the invulner-able voyeuristic eye. (Perhaps public happenings, news, constitute an intermediatecase between staged and unstaged events; but film as newsreel generally amountsto using film as a medium. ) To create on film a document of a transient realityis a conception quite unrelated to the purposes of theatre. It only appears relatedwhen the real event being recorded is a theatrical performance. And the first useof the motion picture camera was to make a documentary record of unstaged, casualreality: Louis Lumiere's films of crowd-scenes in Paris and New York made in the1890's antedate any use of film in the service of plays.The other paradigmatic non-theatrical use of film, which dates from the earliestactivity of the motion-picture camera, is for the creation of illusion, the constructionof fantasy. The pioneer figure here is, of course, Georges Melies. To be sure, Melies(like many directors after him) conceived of the rectangle of the screen on analogywith the proscenium stage. And not only were the events staged; they were the verystuff of invention: imaginary journeys, imaginary objects, physical metamorphoses.But this, even adding the fact that Melies situated his camera in front of the actionand hardly moved it, does not make his films theatrical in an invidious sense. Intheir treatment of persons as things (physical objects) and in their disjunctive presenta-tion of time and space, Melies' films are quintessentially cinematic -so far as thereis such a thing.

The contrast between theatre and films is usually taken to lie in the materialsrepresented or depicted. But exactly where does the difference lie?I

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It's tempting to draw a crude boundary. Theatre deploys artifice while cinema iscommitted to reality, indeed to an ultimately physical reality which is redeemed,to use Siegfried Kracauer's striking word, by the camera. The aesthetic judgment thatfollows this bit of intellectual map-making is that films shot in real-life settings arebetter (i.e., more cinematic) than those shot in a studio (where one can detect thedifference). Obviously, if Flaherty and Italian neo-realism and the cinema verite ofVertov, Rouch, Marker, and Ruspoli are the preferred models, one would judge ratherharshly the period of 100% studio-made films inaugurated around 1920 by TheCabinet of Dr. Caligari, films with ostentatiously artificial landscapes and decor, anddeem the right direction to be that taken at the same period in Sweden, wheremany films with strenuous natural settings were being shot on location. Thus,Panofsky attacks Dr. Caligari for prestylizing reality, and urges upon cinema theproblem of manipulating and shooting unstylized reality in such a way that the resulthas style.But there is no reason to insist on a single model for film. And it is helpful to noticethat, for the most part, the apotheosis of realism, the prestige of unstylized reality,in cinema is actually a covert political-moral position. Films have been rather toooften acclaimed as the democratic art, the art of mass society. Once one takes thisdescription very seriously, one tends (like Panofsky and Kracauer) to want moviesto continue to reflect their origins in a vulgar level of the arts, to remain loyal totheir vast uneducated audience. Thus, a vaguely Marxist orientation jibes with afundamental tenet of romanticism. Cinema, at once high art and popular art, is castas the art of the authentic. Theatre, by contrast, means dressing up, pretense, lies. Itsmacks of aristocratic taste and the class society. Behind the objection of critics tothe stagey sets of Dr. Caligari, the improbable costumes and florid acting of Renoir'sNana, the talkiness of Dreyer's Gertrud, as theatrical, lay the feeling that suchfilms were false, that they exhibited a sensibility both pretentious and reactionarywhich was out-of-step with the democratic and more mundane sensibility of modernlife.

Anyway, whether aesthetic defect or not in the particular case, the synthetic look infilms is not necessarily a misplaced theatricalism. From the beginning of film history,there were painters and sculptors who claimed that cinema's true future residedin artifice, construction. It lay not in figurative narration or story-telling of any kind(either in a relatively realistic or in a surrealistic vein), but in abstraction. Thus,Theo van Doesburg in his essay of 1929, Film as Pure Form, envisages film asthe vehicle of optical poetry, dynamic light architecture, the creation of a movingornament. Films will realize Bach's dream of finding an optical equivalent for thetemporal structure of a musical composition. Today, a few film-makers-forexample, Robert Breer-continue to pursue this conception of film, and who is tosay it is not cinematic?Could anything be farther from the scope of theatre than such a degree of abstraction?It's important not to answer that question too quickly.

Some locate the division between theatre and film as the difference between the

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play and the filmscript. Panofsky derives this difference from what he takes to bethe most profound one: the difference between the formal conditions of seeing a playand those of seeing a movie. In the theatre, says Panofsky, space is static, that is, thespace represented on the stage, as well as the spatial relation of the beholder to thespectacle, is unalterably fixed, while in the cinema the spectator occupies a fixedseat, but only physically, not as the subject of an aesthetic experience. In the cinema,the spectator is aesthetically ... in permanent motion as his eye identifies with thelens of the camera, which permanently shifts in distance and direction.True enough. But the observation does not warrant a radical dissociation of theatrefrom film. Like many critics, Panofsky is assuming a literary conception of theatre.To a theatre which is conceived of basically as dramatized literature, texts, words,he contrasts cinema which is, according to the received phrase, primarily a visualexperience. In effect, we are being asked to acknowledge tacitly the period of silentfilms as definitive of cinematic art and to identify theatre with plays, from Shake-speare to Tennessee Williams. But many of the most interesting movies today arenot adequately described as images with sound added. And what if theatre is con-ceived of as more than, or something different from, plays?Panofsky may be over-simplifying when he decries the theatrical taint in movies, buthe is sound when he argues that, historically, theatre is only one of the arts thatfeeds into cinema. As he remarks, it is apt that films came to be known popularlyas moving pictures rather than as photoplays or screen plays. Movies deriveless from the theatre, from a performance art, an art that already moves, than theydo from works of art which were stationary. Bad nineteenth-century paintings andpostcards, wax-works a la Madame Tussaud, and comic strips are the sourcesPanofsky cites. What is surprising is that he doesn't connect movies with earliernarrative uses of still photography-like the family photo-album. The narrative tech-niques developed by certain nineteenth-century novelists, as Eisenstein pointed out inhis brilliant essay on Dickens, supplied still another prototype for cinema.Movies are images (usually photographs) that move, to be sure. But the distinctiveunit of films is not the image but the principle of connection between the images,the relation of a shot -to the one that preceded it and the one that comes after. Thereis no peculiarly cinematic as opposed to theatrical mode of linking images.

Panofsky tries to hold the line against the infiltration of theatre by cinema, as wellas vice versa. In the theatre, not only can the spectator not change his angle of visionbut, unlike movies, the settings of the stage cannot change during one act (exceptfor such incidentals as rising moons or gathering clouds and such illegitimate reborrow-ings from film as turning wings or gliding backdrops). Were we to assent to this, theideal play would be No Exit, the ideal set a realistic living room or a blank stage.No less dogmatic is the complementary dictum about what is illegitimate in films-according to which, since films are a visual experience, all components must bedemonstrably subordinate to the image. Thus, Panofsky asserts: Wherever a poetic

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emotion, a musical outburst, or a literary conceit (even, I am grieved to say, someof the wisecracks of Groucho Marx) entirely lose contact with visible movement, theystrike the sensitive spectator as, literally, out of place. What, then, of the films ofBresson and Godard, with their allusive, densely thoughtful texts and their character-istic refusal to be visually beautiful? How could one explain the extraordinary right-ness of Ozu's relatively immobilized camera?The decline in average quality of films in the early sound period (compared with thelevel reached by films in the 1920's) is undeniable. Although it would be facile tocall the sheer uninterestingness of most films of this period simply a regression totheatre, it is a fact that film-makers did turn more frequently to plays in the 1930'sthan they had in the preceding decade. Countless stage successes like OutwardBound, Dinner at Eight, Blithe Spirit, Faisons un Reve, Twentieth Century, BouduSauve des Eaux, She Done Him Wrong, Anna Christie, Marius, Animal Crackers, ThePetrified Forest, were filmed. The success of movie versions of plays is measured bythe extent to which the script rearranges and displaces the action and deals less thanrespectfully with the spoken text-as do certain films of plays by Wilde and Shaw,the Olivier Shakespeare films (at least Henry V), and Sjoberg's Miss Julie. But thebasic disapproval of films which betray their origins in plays remains. A recentexample: the outright hostility which greeted Dreyer's latest film, Gertrud. Not onlydoes Gertrud, which I believe to be a minor masterpiece, follow a turn-of-the-centuryplay that has characters conversing at length and quite formally, but it is filmedalmost entirely in middle-shot.Some of the films I have just mentioned are negligible as art; several are first-rate.(The same for the plays, though no correlation between the merits of the movies andthose of the original plays can be established.) However, their virtues and faultscannot be sorted out as a cinematic versus a theatrical element. Whether derivedfrom plays or not, films with complex or formal dialogue, films in which the camerais static or in which the action stays indoors, are not necessarily theatrical. Percontra, it is no more part of the putative essence of movies that the cameramust rove over a large physical area, than it is that movies ought to be silent. Thoughmost of the action of Kurosawa's The Lower Depths, a fairly faithful transcriptionof Gorki's play, is confined to one large room, it is as cinematic as the same director'sThrone of Blood, a very free and laconic adaptation of Macbeth. The quality ofMelville's claustrophobic Les Enfants Terribles is as peculiar to the movies as Ford'sThe Searchers or a train journey in Cinerama.What does make a film theatrical in an invidious sense is when the narration becomescoy or self-conscious: compare Autant-Lara's Occupe-Toi d'Amelie, a brilliantcinematic use of the conventions and materials of theatricality, with Ophuls' clumsyuse of similar conventions and materials in La Ronde.

Allardyce Nicoll, in his book Film and Theatre (1936), argues that the differencemay be understood as a difference in kinds of characters. Practically all effectivelydrawn stage characters are types [while] in the cinema we demand individualization

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... and impute greater power of independent life to the figures on the screen.(Panofsky,it might be mentioned,makes exactly the opposite point: that the natureof films, in contrastto plays, requiresflat or stock characters.)Nicoll's thesis is not as arbitraryas it may at firstappear.I would relate it to the factthat often the indelible moments of a film, and the most potent elements of char-acterization, are precisely the irrelevant or unfunctional details. (A randomexample: the ping-pong ball the schoolmaster toys with in Ivory's ShakespeareWallah.) Movies thrive on the narrativeequivalent of a technique familiar frompaintingand photography,off-centering.It is this that creates the pleasing disunityor fragmentarinesswhat Nicoll means by individualization ?)f the characters ofmany of the greatestfilms. In contrast, linear coherence of detail (the gun on thewall in the firstact that must go off by the end of the third) is the rule in Occidentalnarrative heatre,and gives rise to the sense of the unity of the characters(a unitythatmay appear ike the statementof a type ).But even with these adjustments,Nicoll's thesis seems less than appealingwhen oneperceivesthat it rests on the idea that Whenwe go to the theatre,we expect theatreandnothingelse. What is this theatre-and-nothing-else?t is the old notion of artifice.(As if art were ever anything else. As if some arts were artificial but others not.)Accordingto Nicoll, whenwe are in a theatre inevery way the 'falsity'of a theatricalproduction s borne in upon us, so that we are preparedto demand nothing save atheatricaltruth. In the cinema, however, every member of the audience, no matterhow sophisticated,is on essentially the same level; we all believe that the cameracannotlie. As the film actorandhis role are identical,so the image cannot be dissoci-atedfromwhat is imaged.Cinema,therefore,gives us what is experiencedas the truthof life.Couldn'ttheatredissolve the distinctionbetween the truth of artifice and the truthof life? Isn't that just what the theatre as ritual seeks to do? Isn't that what is beingsoughtwhen theatre is conceived as an exchangewith an audience?-something thatfilmscan neverbe.

If an irreducibledistinctionbetween theatre and cinema does exist, it may be this.Theatre is confinedto a logical or continuous use of space. Cinema(throughediting,that is, throughthe change of shot-which is the basic unit of film construction)hasaccess to an alogical or discontinuous use of space. In the theatre, people areeither in the stage space or off. When on, they are always visible or visualizablein contiguitywith each other. In the cinema, no such relation is necessarilyvisible oreven visualizable.(Example:the last shot of Paradjanov's n the Shadows of OurAncestors.)Some films consideredobjectionablytheatricalare those which seem toemphasize spatial continuities, like Hitchock's virtuoso Rope or the daringlyanachronisticGertrud. But closer analysis of both these films would show howcomplex their treatment of space is. The longer and longer takes toward whichsound films have been moving are, in themselves,neither more nor less cinematicthanthe short takes haracteristic f silents.

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Thus, cinematic virtue does not reside in the fluidity of the positioning of the cameranor in the mere frequency of the change of shot. It consists in the arrangement ofscreen images and (now) of sounds. Melies, for example, though he didn't getbeyond the static positioning of his camera, had a very striking conceptionof how to link screen images. He grasped that editing offered an equivalent to themagician's sleight of hand-thereby suggesting that one of the features of film (asdistinct from theatre) is that anything can happen, that there is nothing that can't berepresented convincingly. Through editing, Melies presents discontinuities of physicalsubstance and behavior. In his films, the discontinuities are, so to speak, practical, func-tional; they accomplish a transformation of ordinary reality. But the continuousreinvention of space (as well as the option of temporal indeterminacy) peculiar to filmnarration does not pertain only to the cinema's ability to fabricate visions, to show usa radically altered world. The most realistic use of the motion-picture camera alsoinvolves a discontinuous account of space.Film narration has a syntax, composed of the rhythm of associations and dis-junctions. As Cocteau has written, My primary concern in a film is to prevent theimages from flowing, to oppose them to each other, to anchor them and join themwithout destroying their relief. (But does such a conception of film syntax entail,as Cocteau thinks, our disavowal of movies as mere entertainment instead of avehicle for thought ?)

In drawing a line of demarcation between theatre and films, the issue of the continuityof space seems to me more fundamental than the difference that might be pointed outbetween theatre as an organization of movement in three-dimensional space (like dance)versus cinema as an organization of plane space (like painting). The theatre'scapacities for manipulating space and time are, simply, much cruder and morelabored than film's. Theatre cannot equal the cinema's facilities for the strictly-con-trolled repetition of images, for the duplication or matching of word and image,and for the juxtaposition and over-lapping of images. (Through advanced lightingtechniques, one can now dissolve on the stage. But as yet there is no equivalent,not even through the most adept use of scrim, of the lap dissolve. )

Theatre has been described as a mediated art, presumably because it usually consistsof a pre-existent play mediated by a particular performance which offers one of manypossible interpretations of the play. Film, in contrast, is regarded as unmediated-because of its larger-than-life scale and more unrefusable impact on the eye, andbecause (in Panofsky's words) the medium of the movies is physical reality as suchand the characters in a movie have no aesthetic existence outside the actors. Butthere is an equally valid sense which shows movies to be the mediated art andtheatre the unmediated one. We see what happens on the stage with our own eyes.We see on the screen what the camera sees. In the cinema, narration proceeds byellipsis (the cut or change of shot); the camera eye is a unified point of view thatcontinually displaces itself. But the change of shot can provoke questions, thesimplest of which is: from whose point of view is the shot seen? And the ambiguity ofpoint of view latent in all cinematic narration has no equivalent in the theatre.Indeed, one should not neglect to emphasize the aesthetically positive role of dis-

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orientation in the cinema. Examples: Busby Berkeley dollying back from an ordinary-looking stage already established as some thirty feet deep to disclose a stage areathree hundred feet square. Resnais panning from character X's point of view a full360?, to come to rest upon X's face.

Much may be made of the fact that, in its concrete existence, cinema is an object(a product, even) while theatre is a performance. Is this so important? In a way, no.Whether objects (like films or paintings) or performances (like music or theatre), all artis first a mental act, a fact of consciousness. The object aspect of film, the performanceaspect of theatre are merely means-means to the experience, which is not only ofbut through the film and the theatre-event. Each subject of an aesthetic experi-ence shapes it to his own measure. With respect to any single experience, it hardlymatters that a film is usually identical from one projection of it to another whiletheatre performances are highly mutable.The difference between object-art and performance-art lies behind Panofsky's obser-vation that the screenplay, in contrast to the theatre play, has no aesthetic existenceindependent of its performance, and characters in movies are the stars who enactthem. It is because the film is an object, a totality that is set, that movie roles areidentical with the actors' performances; while in the theatre (in the West, an additiverather than an organic art?) only the written play is fixed, an object and thereforeexisting apart from any staging of it. Yet this dichotomy is not beyond dispute. Justas movies needn't necessarily be designed to be shown in theatres at all (they can beintended for more continuous and casual looking), a movie may be altered from oneprojection to the next. Harry Smith, when he runs off his own films, makes eachprojection an unrepeatable performance. And, again, it is not true that all theatre isonly about written plays which may be given a good or a bad production. InHappenings and other recent theatre-events, we are precisely being offered playsidentical with their productions in the same sense as the screenplay is identical withthe film.

Yet, a difference remains. Because the film is an object, it is totally manipulable,totally calculable. A film is like a book, another portable art-object; making a film,like writing a book, means constructing an inanimate thing, every element of which isdeterminate. Indeed, in films, this determinancy has or can have a quasi-mathematicalform, like music. (A shot lasts a certain number of seconds, a change of angle of somany degrees is required to match two shots.) Given the total determinacy of theresult on celluloid (whatever the extent of the director's conscious intervention), itwas inevitable that some film directors would want to devise schemas to make theirintentions more exact. Thus, it was neither perverse nor primitive of Busby Berkeleyto have used only one camera to shoot the whole of each of his mammoth dance num-bers. Every set-up was designed to be shot from only one exactly calculated angle.Bresson, working on a far more self-conscious level of artistry, has declared that, forhim, the director's task is to find the single correct way of doing each shot. An imagecannot be justified in itself, according to Bresson; it has an exactly specifiable relationto the temporally adjacent images, which relation constitutes its meaning.

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But the theatre allows only the loosest approximation o this sort of formalconcern.(And responsibility.Justly, French critics speak of the director of a film as itsauthor. )Because they are performances,something always live, theatre-eventsare not subjectto a comparabledegree of control, do not admit a comparablyexactintegrationof effects.It would be foolish to conclude that the best films are those which arise fromthe greatestamount of conscious planning;the plan may be faulty; and with somedirectors, nstinctworksbetterthan any plan. Besides, there is an impressivebody ofimprovised cinema. (To be distinguishedfrom the work of some film-makers,notablyGodard,who have become fascinatedwith the look of improvisedcinema.)Nevertheless, t seems indisputable hat cinema, not only potentiallybut by its nature,is a morerigorousartthantheatre.Thus, not merely a failure of nerve accounts for the fact that theatre, this seasonedart, occupied since antiquity with all sorts of local offices-enacting sacred rites,reinforcingcommunal loyalty, guiding morals, provoking the therapeuticdischargeof violent emotions, conferring social status, giving practical instruction, affordingentertainment,dignifying celebrations, subvertingestablished authority-is now onthe defensivebefore movies, this brashartwith its huge, amorphous,passiveaudience.Meanwhile,moviescontinue to maintaintheir astonishingpace of formal articulation.(Take the commercialcinema of Europe, Japan, and the United States simply since1960, and consider what audiences have become habituated to in the way of in-creasingly elliptical story-tellingand visualization.)

But note:thisyoungestof the artsis also the one mostheavilyburdenedwith memory.Cinema is a time machine.Movies preservethe past, while theatres-no matter howdevoted to the classics, to old plays-can only modernize. Movies resurrect thebeautifuldead;present ntactvanishedor ruinedenvironments; mploy,withoutirony,styles and fashionsthat seem funny today; solemnlyponder irrelevantor naive prob-lems. The historical flavor of anything registered on celluloid is so vivid thatpracticallyall films older than two years or so are saturatedwith a kind of pathos.(The pathosI am describing,which overtakesanimatedcartoonsand drawn,abstractfilms as well as ordinarymovies, is not simply that of old photographs.)Films age(being objects) as no theatre-eventdoes (being always new). There is no pathos ofmortalityin theatre's reality as such, nothing in our responseto a good perform-ance of a Mayakovskyplay comparable o the aestheticrole the emotion of nostalgiahaswhenwe see a filmby Pudovkin.Also worth noting: comparedwith the theatre, innovations in cinema seem to beassimilatedmore efficiently, seem altogether to be more shareable-and not onlybecause new films are quickly and widely circulated.Also, partly because virtuallythe entirebody of accomplishmentn film can be consultedin the present,most film-makers are more knowledgeableabout the history of their art than most theatredirectorsare aboutthe recentpastof theirs.

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FILM AND THEATREThe key word in many discussions of cinema is possibility. A merely classifyinguse of the word occurs, as in Panofsky's engaging judgment that, within theirself-imposed limitations the earlier Disney films . . . represent, as it were, a chemicallypure distillation of cinematic possibilities. But behind this relatively neutral senselurks a more polemical sense of cinema's possibility. What is regularly intimatedis the obsolescence of theatre, its supercession by films.Thus, Panofsky describes the mediation of the camera eye as opening up a world ofpossibility of which the stage can never dream. Artaud, earlier, thought that motionpictures may have made the theatre obsolete. Movies possess a sort of virtualpower which probes into the mind and uncovers undreamt of possibilities. ... Whenthis art's exhilaration has been blended in the right proportions with the psychicingredient it commands, it will leave the theatre far behind and we will relegatethe latter to the attic of our memories.Meyerhold, facing the challenge head on, thought the only hope for theatre lay in awholesale emulation of the cinema. Let us 'cinematify' the theatre, he urged. Thestaging of plays must be industrialized, theatres must accommodate audiences in thetens of thousands rather than in the hundreds, etc. Meyerhold also seemed to findsome relief in the idea that the coming of sound signalled the downfall of movies.Believing that their international appeal depended entirely on the fact that screenactors didn't speak any particular language, he couldn't imagine in 1930 that, evenif that were so, technology (dubbing, sub-titling) could solve the problem.

Is cinema the successor, the rival, or the revivifier of the theatre?

Art forms have been abandoned. (Whether because they became obsolete is anotherquestion.) One can't be sure that theatre is not in a state of irremediable decline,spurts of local vitality notwithstanding. But why should it be rendered obsolete bymovies? It's worth remembering that predictions of obsolescence amount to declaringthat a something has one peculiar task (which another something may do as well orbetter). Has theatre one peculiar task or aptitude?Those who predict the demise of the theatre, assuming that cinema has engulfed itsfunction, tend to impute a relation between films and theatre reminiscent of what wasonce said about photography and painting. If the painter's job had been no morethan fabricating likenesses, the invention of the camera might indeed have madepainting obsolete. But painting is hardly just pictures, any more than cinema is justtheatre for the masses, available in portable standard units.In the naive tale of photography and painting, painting was reprieved when it claimeda new task, abstraction. As the superior realism of photography was supposed to haveliberated painting, allowing it to go abstract, cinema's superior power to represent(not merely to stimulate) the imagination may appear to have emboldened the theatre

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in a similar fashion, inviting the gradual obliterationof the conventional plot.Actually, painting and photography evidence parallel developments rather than arivalryor a supercession.And, at least in principle, so have theatre and film. Thepossibilitiesfor theatre that lie in going beyond psychological realism, in seekinggreaterabstractness,are not less germaneto the future of narrative ilms.Conversely,the notionof movies as witness to real life, testimony ratherthan invention,the treat-mentof collectivesituationsratherthan the depictionof personal dramas, s equallyrelevant to the stage. Not surprisingly,what follows some years after the rise ofcinema verite, the sophisticatedheir of documentary ilms, is a documentary heatre,the theatreof fact. (Cf. Hochhuth,Weiss's The Investigation,recentprojectsof theRoyal ShakespeareCompany n London.)

The influenceof the theatreupon filmsin the early years is well known. AccordingtoKracauer,the distinctivelighting of Dr. Caligari(and of many subsequentGermansilents) can be traced to an experimentwith lighting Max Reinhardtmade shortlybefore, in his productionof Sorge'splay, TheBeggar.Even in this period,however,theimpact was reciprocal. The accomplishmentsof the Expressionist ilm were im-mediatelyabsorbedby the Expressionistheatre.Stimulatedby the cinematictechniqueof the iris-in, tage lightingtook to singlingout a lone player, or some segmentofthe scene, masking out the rest of the stage. Rotating sets tried to approximatetheinstantaneousdisplacementof the cameraeye. (More recently, reportshave come ofingenious lightingtechniquesused by the Gorki Theatrein Leningrad,directedsince1956 by Georgi Tovstonogov,which allow for incrediblyrapid scene changes takingplacebehinda horizontalcurtainof light.)Todaytrafficseems,with few exceptions,entirelyone way:film to theatre.Particularlyin France and in Central and EasternEurope, the stagingof many plays is inspiredby the movies. The aim of adapting neo-cinematic devices for the stage (I excludethe outrightuse of films within the theatre production)seems mainly to tighten upthe theatricalexperience, o approximate he cinema's absolute controlof the flow andlocation of the audience's attention. But the conception can be even more directlycinematic. Example: Josef Svoboda's productionof The Insect Play by the Capekbrothers at the Czech National Theatre in Prague (recently seen in London) whichfrankly attemptedto install a mediated vision upon the stage, equivalent to thediscontinuous intensifications of the camera eye. According to a London critic'saccount, the set consisted of two huge, faceted mirrors slung at an angle to thestage, so that they reflectwhateverhappensthere defractedas if through a decanterstopperor the colossally magnifiedeye of a fly. Any figure placed at the base of theiranglebecomesmultiplied rom floor to proscenium; artherout, and you find yourselfviewing it not only face to face but from overhead, the vantage point of a cameraslungto a birdor a helicopter.

Perhaps the first to propose the use of film itself as one element in a theatreexperiencewas Marinetti.Writingbetween 1910 and 1914, he envisaged the theatreas a final synthesisof all the arts; and as such it had to use the newest art form,

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FILM AND THEATRE

movies. No doubt the cinema also recommended itself for inclusion because of thepriority Marinetti gave to the use of existing forms of popular entertainment, suchas the variety theatre and the cafe-chantant. (He called his projected art form theFuturist Variety Theatre. ) And cinema, at that time, was not considered as anythingother than a vulgar art.Soon after, the idea begins to occur frequently. In the total-theatre projects of theBauhaus group in the 1920's (Gropius, Piscator, etc.), film had a regular place.Meyerhold insisted on its use in the theatre. (He described his program as fulfillingWagner's once wholly utopian proposals to use all means available from theother arts. ) Film's actual employment has by now a fairly long history, whichincludes the living newspaper, epic theatre, and happenings. This year markedthe introduction of a film sequence into Broadway-type theatre. In two highly success-ful musicals, London's Come Spy with Me and New York's Superman, both parodicin tone, the action is interrupted to lower a screen and run off a movie showing thepop-art hero's exploits.Thus far, the use of film within live theatre-events has tended to be stereotyped. Filmis employed as document, supportive of or redundant to the live stage events (as inBrecht's productions in East Berlin). Or else it is employed as hallucinant; recentexamples are Bob Whitman's Happenings, and a new kind of nightclub situation, themixed-media discotheque (Andy Warhol's The Plastic Inevitable, Murray the K'sWorld). The interpolation of film into the theatre-experience may be enlarging fromthe point of view of theatre. But in terms of what film is capable of, it seems a reduc-tive, monotonous use of film.

Every interesting aesthetic tendency now is a species of radicalism. The question eachartist must ask is: What is my radicalism, the one dictated by my gifts and tempera-ment? This doesn't mean all contemporary artists believe that art progresses. A radicalposition isn't necessarily a forward-looking position.

Consider the two principal radical positions in the arts today. One recommends thebreaking down of distinctions between genres; the arts would eventuate in one art,consisting of many different kinds of behavior going on at the same time, a vastbehavioral magma or synaesthesis. The other position recommends the maintainingand clarifying of barriers between the arts, by the intensification of what each artdistinctively is; painting must use only those means which pertain to painting, musiconly those which are musical, novels those which pertain to the novel and to no otherliterary form, etc.The two positions are, in a sense, irreconcilable. Except that both are invoked tosupport a perennial modern quest-the quest for the definitive art form. An art maybe proposed as definitive because it is considered the most rigorous, or most funda-mental. For these reasons, Schopenhauer suggested and Pater asserted that all art

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aspires to the condition of music. More recently, the thesis that all the arts areleadingtowardone art has been advancedby enthusiastsof the cinema.The candidacyof film is founded on its being so exact and, potentially, so complex-a rigorouscombinationof music,literature,and the image.Or, an art may be proposedas definitivebecause it is the most inclusive. This is thebasis of the destiny for theatre held out by Wagner, Marinetti, Artaud, John Cage-all of whomenvisagetheatre as nothing ess than a total art, potentiallyconscriptingall the arts into its service. And as the ideas of synaesthesiacontinue to proliferateamong painters, sculptors, architects, and composers, theatre remains the favoredcandidate for the role of summative art. So conceived, of course, theatre'sclaimsdo contradictthose of cinema. Partisansof theatre would argue that while music,painting,dance, cinema, the speakingof words, etc. can all converge on a stage,the film-objectcan only become bigger (multiple screens, 360? projection, etc.) orlongerin durationor moreinternallyarticulatedandcomplex.Theatrecan be anything,everything; n the end, films can only be more of what they specifically(that is tosay, cinematically)are.

Underlying he competingapocalypticexpectations or botharts,one detects a commonanimus. In 1923 Bela Balazs, anticipating n great detail the thesis of MarshallMc-Luhan,describedmovies as the heraldof a new visualculture hat will give us backourbodies,andparticularly ur faces, which have been rendered llegible,soulless,un-expressiveby the centuries-oldascendancyof print. An animus against literature,against theprintingpress andits cultureof concepts, also informs mostof the inter-esting thinkingaboutthe theatre in our time.

What's important is that no definition or characterizationof theatre and cinema,even the mostself-evident,be taken for granted.For instance: both cinema and theatre are temporal arts. Like music (and unlikepainting),everything s not presentall at once.Could this be modified?The allure of mixed-media forms in theatre suggests notonly a more elongatedand more complex drama like Wagnerianopera) but alsoa more compacttheatre-experiencewhich approaches he condition of painting.Thisprospectof increasedcompactness s broachedby Marinetti;he calls it simultaneity,a leadingidea of Futuristaesthetics. In becominga final synthesisof all the arts, saysMarinetti, heatre woulduse the new twentieth-century evices of electricityand thecinema;this would enableplays to be extremelyshort, since all these technicalmeanswould enable the theatricalsynthesisto be achieved in the shortestpossible space oftime, as all the elementscould be presentedsimultaneously.

A pervasivenotion in both advancedcinema and theatreis the idea of art as an act

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of violence. Its sourceis to be found in the aestheticsof Futurismand of Surrealism;its principal texts are, for theatre, the writings of Artaud and, for cinema, thetwo classic films of Luis Bufiuel,L'Age d'Or and Un Chien Andalou. (More recentexamples:the early plays of lonesco, at least as conceived; the cinema of crueltyof Hitchcock, Clouzot, Franju, Robert Aldrich, Polanski; work by the LivingTheatre;some of the neo-cinematic ightingtechniquesused in experimental heatres;the sound of late Cage and LaMonte Young.) The relation of art to an audienceunderstoodto be passive, inert, surfeited,can only be assault.Art becomes identicalwith aggression.This theory of art as assault on the audience-like the complementarynotion ofart as ritual-is understandable, nd precious.Still, one must not neglect to questionit, particularly n the theatre.For it can become as much a convention as anythingelse; and end, like all theatrical conventions, by reinforcing the deadness of theaudience. (As Wagner'sideology of a total theatre played its role in confirmingthestupidityandbestialityof Germanculture.)Moreover, the depth of the assault must be assessed honestly. In the theatre, thisentails not diluting Artaud. Artaud'swritings representthe demand for a totallyopen (therefore, flayed, self-cruel) consciousness of which theatre would be oneadjunctor instrument.No work in the theatre has yet amountedto this. Thus, PeterBrook has astutely and forthrightlydisclaimed that his company'swork in Londonin the Theatreof Cruelty, which culminated n his celebratedproductionof Weiss'Marat/Sade, is genuinelyArtaudian. It is Artaudian,he says, in a trivial sense only.(Trivial romArtaud'spointof view, not fromours.)

For some time, all useful ideas in arthave been extremelysophisticated.Like the ideathateverything s what it is, and not anotherthing. A painting s a painting.Sculptureis sculpture.A poem is a poem, not prose. Etcetera. And the complementary dea: apaintingcan be literary r sculptural,a poem can be prose, theatrecan emulate andincorporate inema,cinemacan be theatrical.We needa newidea. It will-probablybe a very simpleone. Will we be able to recognizeit?

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Sontag Theatre and Film

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